This conversation is a real eye-opener about what goes into creating, running, and maintaining a food market. We all shop for groceries but this podcast with Pete Marczyk, co-founder the CEO of Marczyk Fine Foods will make you look at food shopping, starting a business, and nurturing a business, in a whole new way.
Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of the In Good Taste Denver Podcast conversation with Pete Marczyk. Listen to the full conversation by clicking on the player, below. As with all of our podcasts, you’ll get a lot out of hearing the passion in our guests’ voices as they talk about the story behind their businesses. Our thanks to Marczyk Fine Foods for sponsoring this podcast and our roundup of What’s In Good Taste in June.
Running any business for twenty years is an accomplishment, but especially an independent one. This is Courtney Drake-McDonough publisher of ingoodtastedenver.com and host of the In Good Taste Denver podcast. My guest today is Pete Marczyk, cofounder and CEO of Marczyk Fine Foods, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. Pete, congratulations on that accomplishment and I’m so glad you could join us today.
IGTD: What were you doing before you opened the first store, and did it have anything to do with the food market business?
Pete Marczyk: Well, the answer to the second part of the question is absolutely nothing! So, we can start there but I had a really pretty varied, and I wouldn’t say terribly checkered, past. My immediate job before the market opened was I had done about a year of mortgage brokering that I had taken from my experience of about ten years at Merrill Lynch.
And so, really, my big professional introduction to the world was as a retail stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. And when I decided I wanted to move on from that, I liked doing that, and it was a really great job in a very good industry with an incredibly good company.
It was a wonderful launchpad for practically any career, but I wasn’t in love with it. It was one of those things where I liked doing what I did, and I really enjoyed particularly my customers and my colleagues at Merrill Lynch. I just wasn’t passionate about stocks, bonds, mutual funds and options the way that I had this kind of very fiery passion for food and wine that I had always had.
And so food and wine were my avocation and sales was my vocation. And those were the two things that I tried to bring together for my own life in a business package that I that I hoped and thought could make sense financially. So prior to Merrill, I’d mainly done construction related jobs. I owned a little co-owned a little company with a with a good friend. We did painting, paper hanging and plastering. And before that, I did a lot of grunt work. So I’ve kind of run the gamut.
IGTD: Well, it sounds like all of those things sort of ended up lending themselves to this experience, especially in those early days, right?
PM: I think the sales training that I got was really formative. Also, just the notion that you’re just going to have to work pretty hard, having been in construction trades and as a broker at Merrill, I mean, you’re up early and staying late if you want to make it past your first couple of years.
So, being a grocer, candidly, it’s hard work. And our team proves that every day. The store doesn’t look the way it does by accident or without a lot of effort. So yeah, it did teach me a lot.
It all it all dovetailed in. The food part really came from – I grew up in western Massachusetts in this very small town. It’s a small section of the Connecticut River Valley that is just incredibly fertile. Like, we have some of the best asparagus and sweet corn and dairy anywhere on the planet.
And that was just what I grew up with. My family had this incredible garden. We raised chickens and rabbits. My brother and I tended some animals on a really small residential scale. But those are flavors and senses that get awakened from that food that you never forget. And I that was really the food driver.
I worked in some restaurants mostly as a dishwasher as a kid. So I had some back-of-house experience, some food experience. And then I just really took it into this place where I tried to do everything I could to educate myself and read the way deeper dive on food, where it comes from, what makes it good, what makes it great, what made maybe makes it not so good or great. If there’s anything steeper than “vertical” in terms of a learning curve, I’ve been on that for the last twenty years now.
IGTD: I always say to my kids “there’s there are no wasted experiences.” I think you take something from everything you do, and you’re a perfect example of that. What was the food shopping scene like in twenty years ago before you opened the store?
PM: I get asked that a lot and it usually is dovetailed into the question, “what made you think this would work?” Denver was very different from where I grew up in the sense that I grew up in a town where there were markets that catered to neighborhoods or certain ethnic groups. There was a Polish market, there was a little French market. There were the neighborhood markets. And when I moved out here, there were a few places I think of as some of the pioneers, like Sid’s and FBC were still here.
But beyond that, there were really very few independents. Everything was chained. And what I learned very quickly, as I started to dive into it, food and supply chain and provenance of food, I realized that really it was a very homogenous supply chain. And that the banner might be different in the front door, and the logo color might be a little different. But really, the supply chain was so narrow. That became very apparent to me, and that was kind of the impetus for me to start to think about this in a more meaningful way. How can we get some of the best items from, say, New England or the Southeast or California or the Pacific Northwest or even, regionally, to the Intermountain West? Whether it’s a produced and preserved food or whether it’s absolutely fresh, how can we do this? And so that was really the whole impetus.
I used to shop when I was doing dinner parties. I mean, that’s kind of how I got ready to do this. I cooked a lot and was mentored by some incredible cooks and chefs through the years who really took me under their wing and really taught me the fundamentals – basically a culinary school education without going to culinary school.
But I would shop for a dinner and you get bread here and you go get the meat there. Or they’re just seafood. You go over here and maybe you might need a nice, canned tomato. So you go to this other place. And I said, gosh, we can do this and we can make something out of this.
Whole Foods had just opened in Cherry Creek, and I was working on our business plan. It took a couple of years. I mean, it was a bit of a slog, partly because I didn’t know anything, so that was Thing One, Challenge One: learn stuff. And when Whole Foods came in, I was like, oh, no, I’m cooked.
And then I realized that they’re kind of the same just, different dressing. And, they’re wonderful. They’re very different today than they were then. But that was another great pioneer in this industry and really helped to change how people look at food.
But, back then, that was hippie food. I didn’t necessarily want crunchy hippie. We have “fine” in our name, Fine Foods. A lot of our food is crunchy and hippie, but we indexed for that, the quality.
That doesn’t mean we’re the best at everything we do, but we damn sure try and I think that’s the main difference that we were trying to capture was that grown up city shopping experience in a neighborhood market. Not everything. Just everything you need in one spot, fully curated, really thoughtfully sourced. And I just didn’t feel that existed.
IGTD: I know you had to obtain your own funding. What was the elevator speech that you gave to prospective investors about what Marczyk Fine Foods would be and why it was needed in the marketplace at that time?
PM: It was a really risky thing for me, for my wife who’s my cofounding business partner and greatest supporter in the world, along with my brother, who was encouraging me, and a bunch of friends who were encouraging me.
But it was really hard to raise the money. We started in earnest raising money in January of 2001. And we were under construction in April and May of 2001, and I hadn’t quite finished raising the money and then 9/11 hit and so we had to stop construction because I had a couple of people pull out of the deal and then it was just super scary.
It made an already scary thing way scarier. But we have an incredible group of just amazing, helpful, very, very supportive investors who helped us get this thing launched.
I thought I’d have a string of these within three years and be wildly successful and that King Soopers or Whole Foods couldn’t live with us or without us, but it just didn’t work out that way. We had to make adjustments to our financial plan, literally, five days in, ten days in, when I realized that the people just were not streaming in the way that I thought they would.
And oh my gosh, those first those first months and that first year was just… It’s like you remember people who’ve been gone a long time and you never remember any of the fights you had, you just remember the good things? And that’s kind of how this is. But as I think about it, I think about how hard we worked. I think about how hard our crews work. I think about how hard it was for them to be led by me not knowing as much as I should or could have.
And yet I knew what I wanted as a product and I knew we weren’t getting it, and I knew we could still do it. So we just kept doubling down.
Editor’s Note: Pete goes on to talk about how his original vision of Marczyk Fine Foods morphed to meet the needs (and requests) of shoppers, including providing the freshly made sandwiches and soups they are known for. He explains how their hugely popular Burger Nights started with an educational element. And, he continues with how they rode the wave of the pandemic and have been able to adapt to various changes throughout the year. Be sure to listen to the entire podcast to hear about what goes into a successful business as well as Pete’s appreciation for the market, his team, their vendor-partners, and 20 years of customers.
Visit the Marczyk Fine Foods website, here. Check them out Instagram at @marczykfinefoods and here on Facebook. Watch the video of Pete Marczyk talking about the start and growth of Marczyk Fine Foods to put a face with the voice.
— Courtney Drake-McDonough, Publisher and Managing Editor or InGoodTasteDenver.com.
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